#100: ‘The 12 Greatest Rounds of Boxing: The untold stories’ by Ferdie Pacheco

‘The 12 Greatest Rounds of Boxing’ is Ferdie Pacheco’s attempt to list just that, 12 single rounds of boxing which he believes meet the following criteria:

1) Rounds that had a significant, lasting effect on the rules of boxing
2) Rounds that affected a fighter’s career
3) Rounds of international importance beyond their boxing significance
4) Rounds in which life and death hung in the balance and in the atmosphere

The book features the following rounds:

– Jack Dempsey vs Jess Willard, Round 1, July 4, 1919
– Jack Dempsey vs Gene Tunney, Round 7, September 22, 1927
– Joe Louis vs Max Schmeling, Round 1, June 22, 1938
– Joe Louis vs Billy Conn, Round 13, June 18, 1941
– Sugar Ray Robinson vs Jake LaMotta, Round 13, February 14, 1951
– Rocky Marciano vs Jersey Joe Walcott, Round 13, September 23, 1952
– Cassius Clay vs Sonny Liston, Round 5, February 24, 1964
– Muhammad Ali vs Sonny Liston, Round 1, May 25, 1965
– Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman, Round 8, October 30, 1974
– Muhammad Ali vs Joe Frazier, Round 14, October 1, 1975
– Thomas Hearns vs Sugar Ray Leonard, Round 14, September 16, 1981
– Marvellous Marvin Hagler vs Thomas Hearns, Round 1, April 15, 1985

Pacheco is certainly one of a very small band of people who would be granted to write just about whatever they wanted about professional boxing, and have it published and accepted as integral reading. Having spent decades working as a Miami-based doctor, providing treatment to countless professional boxers whilst there, acting as ringside physician for just about all of Muhammad Ali’s career, and working later as a TV broadcaster in the United States, it’s no wonder he is so revered.

His closeness to Ali (as he acknowledges in the introduction) explains why the great man features so prominently in this book. Of course, many other writers may well have leant toward Ali in a similar fashion, but I suspect they would have erred on the side of balance and given more space to other fighters.

As regular readers will know, I’m not a fan of boxing books being divided into 12 chapters, or ’rounds’. I find this too cliched and it just annoys me, but I do think the concept works in this book as it reflects, properly, the author’s intentions. However, it remains a little odd (and illustrates why I find the concept so annoying), as all the rounds featured in the book – except perhaps Hagler vs Hearns – are taken from bouts of at least 15 rounds, with, I’m assuming, the Dempsey fights being scheduled for more.

12 rounds for championship contests is a still a relatively new concept in the history of the sport, with 15 rounds still not telling the full story of nearly 140 years of gloved boxing. It always smacks of publishers becoming to concerned with a formatting gimmick, by trying to make a visual link with a sport they don’t properly understand.